In 1926, James Sibley Watson Jr. — publisher of The Dial, the era’s great American modernist magazine — and his friend Melville Webber started filming Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in an old Rochester stable, with a cast of locals and twelve kilowatts of lighting. Two years later they had produced one of the first avant-garde films made in the United States.
Theirs was a deliberately amateur modernism, and they knew it: “the amateur who tries to compete with the professional producer on his own ground is licked from the start.” So instead of competing with The Phantom of the Opera, they made something stranger:
- A wordless thirteen-minute film — no dialogue, no intertitles, just Poe’s text and the disintegrating words SCREAM, RIPPED, CRACK
- Roderick as a “vampiric Rudolph Valentino,” Madeline served by disembodied gloved hands
- Kaleidoscopes before the lens as the image itself falls apart with Roderick’s mind
The project grew straight out of Sibley Watson’s modernist creed — the man who published The Waste Land and championed William Carlos Williams argued that art should give “the valuable skeleton, the pure shapes,” not likeness. Poe’s Roderick Usher, the obsessive abstract painter, was a proto-modernist waiting for the right medium.
The same year, Epstein and Buñuel made their own French Usher — which Mathilde Montpetit, the essay’s author, judges hopelessly commercial by comparison, and worse: they chickened out by making the Ushers husband and wife instead of suspiciously intimate siblings.
The pair later shot Lot in Sodom (1933) in the same stable — one of the first queer films in American cinema, and a commercial success. Unable to beat the professionals on their own ground, they broke their own.
Full text of the essay and the restored film are free to watch on The Public Domain Review.